Ars compares five apps to see which ones offer the best experience to comic lovers.

Loyalty to a certain comic book series can be a hard thing to shake. I enjoy reading comic lines from DC, Marvel, and Dark Horse, even if I haven't always been pleased with the creative directions they have taken over the years. My favorite publishers have done some questionable things with their imprints, but I am still hooked on the comics-reading experience. Of course, I still expect good characters, storylines, and presentation out of these comics.

If I wanted to read series from those publishers on paper, I could walk into a comic book shop, stock up on my monthly titles, and read them in one single place. But let’s be real: I no longer read comics in print. I haven’t bought comics on paper from a shop since these three publishers started putting their comics online.

In our previous post about comics readers, we looked at apps that let you load comics from your own collection and from publishers who make DRM-free versions of their titles. But some of the largest publishers of US comics—including DC, Marvel, Image Comics, IDW Publishing, and Dark Horse—don't fall into this category. What are the easiest ways to purchase comics from these publishers, and which of these apps offer the best features in reading technology? As a follow-up to our look at DRM-free comic readers, we decided to review five apps that let you purchase and read these comics on your iPad.

We considered the ease of purchasing comics from each of the five apps. We also took into account the reader’s user experience: Besides giving you access to your purchases, do the apps’ user interfaces let you enjoy reading a comic without too much fuss? Sure, the retina screen of the iPad will render panels and covers pretty nicely, but does the app let you just sink into the story without annoyance? For each app we also listed instances where the universal app is available, for readers who may also use iPhones to read comics.

Enlarge/ ComicsPlus actually feels like visiting a comics store, because you can find dozens of imprints and genres. (It's not always about capes and tights.)

ComicsPlus, made by developer iVerse Media, tries to make things easy for comics fans when it comes to finding titles and reading them easily. It borrows heavily from Apple’s iTunes Store model and makes use of Apple's in-app purchasing system. You can search across multiple publishers and content providers, buy whatever you want, and then consume the comics inside the very app you bought them from. I thought that was pretty cool.

The app’s store is the first thing you see when you launch the app. Its moving panels slide in and out, showcasing titles like G.I. Joe, The Hypernaturals, and more. The store’s interface lets you find comics by what's featured, most recently added, and the top titles. But the best part of the store is the button on the upper left to “Browse Store.”

Here you can easily access more than five dozen different publishers in one single place, which is handy if you have loyalty to certain brands. It would be nice to be able to bookmark them, but you can scroll alphabetically pretty quickly. ComicsPlus is a great reminder that good comics don’t just come packaged in bustiers and tights. The ComicsPlus apps offers titles from dozens of imprints, and you can easily view them from your iOS device or over the Web.

Sadly, you can’t get access to Dark Horse or DC titles on this app, and the Marvel titles that are available don’t reflect the full range of what makes Marvel’s comics so compelling. However, IDW and Image can be found here, so this app could potentially fill all your needs depending on which publishers’ comics you read.

Reading a comic in ComicsPlus is about as basic as you can get. You get a progress bar that acts as an automatic bookmark, and you can use a sharing button at the top for rating the app, or sharing on Facebook and Twitter. There are no brightness controls or other reading preferences.

Platform: iPad

The Good: Great selection of all kinds of titles, including manga, horror and imprints like Image and IDW.

The Bad: You’re not going to be able to read Dark Horse or DC on this one; Marvel selections are slim.

Enlarge/ If you're loyal to certain imprints like Dark Horse, it may make sense to download their app.

I am a huge Mike Mignola fan, and if I want to read the digital versions of Hellboy, I use the Dark Horse app. Individual issues of each title can be easily purchased using Apple’s in-app purchase system, and prices are a bit lower than their print counterparts. I found most Hellboy issues priced at around $1.99.

(Dark Horse does offer a browser reader that anyone can use, regardless of device or operating system. In that sense, Dark Horse does offer a pretty good alternative for reading your Dark Horse library over the cloud. In my experience, however, the Web-based versions of comic-reading apps can be a bit clunky, depending on how the HTML is rendered. For that reason, I prefer reading comics via apps.)

Comics that run in a limited series or are part of bundles are unfortunately not available for purchase as a bundle, however. According to Dark Horse, Apple’s limitations on in-app purchases prevent this type of pricing from becoming available to users. However, you can buy bundles from Dark Horse through its website, and any purchases you have made using your account will be available on the iOS app. As such, buying directly from Dark Horse is an easy way to circumvent this issue.

The reading experience on the Dark Horse app is fairly simple. You can zoom in using a double-tap gesture, though it seems to only zoom in on a pre-set area of the screen. Zooming on individual panels is unresponsive. In-app brightness controls are a welcome feature, and you can enable panel zooming if you like, and the app will guide you through each panel. You can also tweet from inside the app.

Platform: iPad and iPhone

The Good: Access to titles like Hellboy, Emily the Strange, and Lone Wolf and Cub.

The Bad: It’s basically the only app you can use to read Dark Horse, and its user experience feels mediocre at best.

Enlarge/ Wait, I can really view my Marvel and DC purchases all in one app? In this view you can see some of my purchases, but there's more than 60 imprints to choose from in the Comics store.

comiXology originally launched as an online community for comics fans, and in 2010 the company launched its own digital comics readers for mobile devices and the Web. comiXology's iPad app, simply titled Comics, is probably the closest thing to a seamless store and reader experience a comics fan can find on the iPad.

What makes comiXology a leader in this area is the content deals it has brokered to stock the store. comiXology has landed exclusive agreements with Marvel, and it also holds the exclusive distribution for DC’s comics. You can find more than 50 other imprints in the Comics app, bringing you closer to an actual comic book shop experience. All in all, comiXology provides comics from more than 60 publishers. The Comics app is similar to the iTunes store in its ease of purchasing content from various providers.

Comics’ interface provides a fairly straightforward shopping experience and a streamlined reading experience. These interface touches have proved so successful for comiXology that it has actually licensed the app’s interface to both Marvel and DC’s own apps, which we will cover later on in this review.

The Comics app launches right away into its store, and you are greeted by various panels showing off the latest covers and promos from publishers. The app lets you view comics by series, genre, creator, or publisher. The publishers view provides some nice thumbnails of the logos of each publisher, but there is no other sorting available. This doesn’t make for a good shopping experience if you’re looking to browse for titles. However, it’s nice to see so many choices inside the app, and I have spent many hours just browsing through different imprints to find new interesting titles. You can quickly start purchasing issues using an iTunes store account. Titles begin to download immediately onto your device after purchase.

The Comics app offers a few nice cloud-syncing features for purchases. You can view your purchases, and if you happen to buy your titles from one of the publishers over the Web or using another app, you can download that title right onto your iPad. This is the feature that sold me on Comics. By combining my purchases (which are mostly from Marvel and DC), I now have access to my paid comics in the cloud. The purchased items view could use refinement, though, since it only sorts them according to purchase date. It would be nice to be able to sort by other attributes like title, creator, or even characters mentioned in each issue.

Readers who purchase titles in the Comics app also get access to them in their Web-based reader, so even if you don’t have your iPad or iPhone handy, you can still view your comics on other operating systems and hardware.

The reading experience of the Comics app is pretty standard. You can turn letterboxing on or off, turn transitions on (and control their speed), and show pages on enter and exit. However, the panel-by-panel guided view is elegant and slick. As the app guides you through the story, the letterboxing and cropping adjusts to display each panel in a high level of detail. To me this feels immersive and almost invisible, but guided viewing can be a pretty subjective thing. Playing with it is pretty easy, and you can ignore it if it doesn’t suit your reading needs.

Platform: iPad

The Good: This app gives you access to the major imprints in a single convenient spot.

Cesar Torres
Cesar is the Social Editor at Ars Technica. His areas of expertise are in online communities, human-computer interaction, usability, and e-reader technology. Cesar lives in New York City. Emailcesar.torres@arstechnica.com//Twitter@Urraca